Haltingly headed into the Age of Bizarro

Superman comics fans may remember the character Bizarro, a monster caricature with super powers. He was grotesque, not handsome, and spoke in opposites, e.g. “bad” meant “good.”

Everything about Bizarro was opposite of normal. He was Superman's formidable antagonist, although he also was pretty dumb.

We live in the Age of Bizarro.

How else to explain our counterintuitive reality? We celebrate freedom by handing government more control. Government acts of benevolence, intended to bless, instead weave a web of curses. When government gets opposite its intended effect, instead of stopping, our caretakers double down with more of what has failed. Inevitably, we cheer their bizarre remedies for the problems they created.

The criminal justice system of our founders recognized that evils result when men have power over other men. That's why ours was intended to be a system of laws, not of men. Laws were to be based on obvious, universal truths, a safeguard against men's arbitrariness.

Yet, when a jury acquitted George Zimmerman in the self-defense shooting death of a 17-year-old who was beating Zimmerman's skull on concrete, the government reacted bizarrely. Rather than seeing the verdict as application of law, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced he would search for excuses to reprosecute Zimmerman for a federal crime.

One might think that, had an obvious, universal law been violated, the federal government wouldn't need to search for it. This man-centered quest for vengeance is precisely what a nation of laws was intended to prevent.

Then, there is the government's massive health care “reform,” through which we were assured nearly everyone would receive insurance, keep their doctors and reduce costs. Bizarrely, the Obama administration has resorted to suspending major parts of Obamacare to make it work, or at least, not fail as soon.

Next year, employers with at least 50 employees won't be required to provide affordable insurance or pay fines, as the law requires. People who want tax-subsidized insurance won't have to prove they qualify. This comes after previously exempting scores of unions and corporations from Obamacare's coverage limits in 2013.

Rather than dismantle this unworkable Rube Goldberg mechanism, the government insists on implementing it, if unevenly, sporadically and without parts in place ostensibly necessary for it to function.

Our Bizarro Age results in not just unintended consequences, but also outcomes opposite of those intended. Here's something no one read in the brochures touting this “reform.” The National Bureau of Economic Research projects up to 940,000 Americans may be driven out of the workforce in order to obtain government-provided health care.

If that's not bizarre enough, consider the clamor to reform the secret government court that oversees government spying on citizens. This is a variation on the liar's dilemma: How can you know a liar is telling the truth? He's a liar. If the government says its secret court is reformed, how would we know that's true? The court's activities are secret.

Bizarro never realized how bizarre were the things he said. President Obama, too, is oblivious. His implementation of the 2,600-page Obamacare law so far has spawned at least 13,000 pages of new regulations, with many more on the way.

Obama has increased government's regulatory heft to unprecedented levels, but bizarrely complained recently that Congress passed, “a lot of legislation that has poorly designed some of our agencies and forces some of our folks to engage in bureaucratic hoop jumping.”

Try this for bizarre: Obama said he would use tax money to help homeowners refinance their underwater mortgages to save their homes. The federal Home Affordable Modification Program reduced interest rates and principle owed or extended loans for 1.2 million since 2009. But 306,000 of those “helped” have since re-defaulted, and another 88,000 are about to.

There may be nothing more bizarre than the government's counterintuitive and counterproductive help. In a nation of 314 million people, what does it say that 101 million get food through one of the 15 government programs paid for with tax dollars? That is more than the number of people working in the private sector.

At some point, even Age of Bizarro advocates take notice. The progressive Century Foundation critiqued Obama's efforts to improve the economy, concluding: “Nearly 90 million Americans are not working, up by 9.5 million since Obama took office. Conversely, 15 million more Americans are on food stamps today than in January 2009, bringing the total to nearly 50 million.”

But this may take the Bizarro cake: The first African American president campaigned to put race issues behind us and unite the nation. But public attitudes on race relations have grown pessimistic since his election, says a poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal. Only 52 percent of whites and 38 percent of blacks have a favorable opinion of race relations, compared with 79 and 63 percent, respectively, when he took office. Bizarre.

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